We were promised (by the Government) that our pensions would be safe "whatever happens to your employer" but that was a lie. More and more people discovered to their horror that, when their employer went bankrupt, they had lost not only their job but also their pension. Some people even lost what the Government was pleased to call the "Guaranteed Minimum Pension". This could happen even if the scheme met the Minimum Funding Requirement, because the Government had set it too low; and some people with solvent employers lost their pensions too when their schemes were closed, because the Government had left a loophole in the regulations

Fighting back

The primary focus of the PAG is to address the shortcomings within the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS), which was introduced to provide assistance to those of us who had lost most of their occupational pensions when their schemes closed down.

Government headlines proclaim that recipients of FAS will receive 90% of their company pension, but the reality is that we will receive less than 50% over our retirement period. Our latest leaflet describes the outstanding issues we have. The most important of these is the lack of future indexation for any part of your fund that was accrued before 1997, which for most of us is the majority our pension. The only portion that will attract any indexation is the period from 1997 until the start of wind up of your scheme. Most schemes started to wind up in 1999 or 2000, so this is a very small proportion of your pension.

The lack of indexation over the rest of your lifetime will be devastating.

Please peruse the website to see for yourself the long campaign that we have been running, and the efforts that have been made to try to achieve justice for those affected by this scandal.

Find fellow scheme members

If you want to make contact with members of your pension scheme, it can be difficult because neither trustees nor the FAS/PPF will hand out personal details. PAG doesn't have members from every scheme but we do cover many of them and if you write to us at contact-us@pensionstheft.org we will try to put you in contact with other members of your scheme.

AEA Technology

Members of the AEAT scheme are setting up a members group. There are more details here.

We are very interested in hearing from people who have been caught in a similar position. If you are interested in joining our action group, or finding out more, send an e-mail to: contact-us@pensionstheft.org